Murad Quotes

Ten years ago a book appeared in France called D'Une foi l'autre, les conversions a l'Islam en Occident. The authors, both career journalists, carried out extensive interviews with new Muslims in Europe and America. Their conclusions are clear. Almost all educated converts to Islam come in through the door of Islamic spirituality. In the middle ages, the Sufi tariqas were the only effective engine of Islamisation in Muslim minority areas like Central Asia, India, black Africa and Java; and that pattern is maintained today.

Why should this be the case? Well, any new Muslim can tell you the answer. Westerners are in the first instance seeking not a moral path, or a political ideology, or a sense of special identity - these being the three commodities on offer among the established Islamic movements. They lack one thing, and they know it - the spiritual life. Thus, handing the average educated Westerner a book by Sayyid Qutb, for instance, or Mawdudi, is likely to have no effect, and may even provoke a revulsion. But hand him or her a collection of Islamic spiritual poetry, and the reaction will be immediately more positive. It is an extraordinary fact that the best-selling religious poet in modern America is our very own Jalal al-Din Rumi. Despite the immeasurably different time and place of his origin, he outsells every Christian religious poet.

Islam and the New Millennium ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

Muslims all over the world are looking with high expectations toward the ummah community in the United States and Canada. Its dynamism, fresh approach, enlightened scholarship and sheer growth is their hope for an Islamic renaissance worldwide. ~ Murad Wilfried Hofmann

The alpha male must not be a wife beta. ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

Words are free, action is not. ~ Murad S. Shah

I have studied Murad Saeed's case myself, He have not submitted any fake degree. Its a conspiracy against him. If he had any fears, if he was guilty he wouldn't have went to court. ~ Imran Khan

They did not ask my permission for their mediocrity, why should I ask theirs for excellence? ~ Murad S. Shah

The traditional ijma' consensus is as objectionable to takfir-validating Wahhabis as it is to homosexualist or feminist exegetes. ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

The childhood poverty of both my parents and their minimal education did much to influence me and my two younger brothers in our education and career choices. One brother became a dentist and the other, a professor of anthropology with a Ph.D. degree. ~ Ferid Murad

Chechnya forms the bookends to Tolstoy's career. He began writing his first novel, 'Childhood,' while in Starogladovskaya in Northern Chechnya, and his final novel, 'Hadji Murad,' is set in the Russo-Chechen War of the 19th century. ~ Anthony Marra

The outcome should not drive the action. Your desire to achieve the outcome should. The outcome depends on many variables, most of which are not in your control. Do what you need to do because you want to do it, not because of whether or not the outcome will be achieved. ~ Murad S. Shah

How many leaders in the Islamic world are really familiar with the ideas which underpin modernity? I have met some leaders of activist factions, and have been consistently shocked by their lack of knowledge. How many can even name the principal intellectual systems of our time? Structuralism, post-modernism, realism, analytic philosophy, critical theory, and all the rest are closed books to them. Instead they burble on about the 'International Zionist Masonic Conspiracy', or 'Baha'ism', or the 'New Crusader Invasion', or similar phantasms. If we want to understand why so many Islamic movements fail, we should perhaps begin by acknowledging that their leaders simply do not have the intellectual grasp of the modern world which is the precondition for successfully overcoming the obstacles to Islamic governance. A Muslim activist who does not understand the ideologies of modernism can hardly hope to overcome them.

Islam and the New Millennium ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

At some point, there was rape and nothing else. This becomes your normal day. You don't know who is going to open the door next to attack you, just that it will happen and that tomorrow might be worse. You stop thinking about escaping or seeing your family again. Your past life becomes a distant memory, like a dream. Your body doesn't belong to you, and there's no energy to talk or to fight or to think about the world outside. There is only rape and the numbness that comes with accepting that this is now your life. Fear was better. With fear, there is assumption that what is happening isn't normal. Sure, you feel like your heart will explode and you will throw up, you cling desperately to your family and friends and your grovel in front of the terrorists, you cry until you go blind, but at least you do something. Hopelessness is close to death. ~ Nadia Murad

Memory depends on the medium, I thought; brains are such imperfect recorders. I ~ Mahvesh Murad

The Islamic world is passing through a most devastating period of transition. A history of economic and scientific change which in Europe took five hundred years, is, in the Muslim world, being squeezed into a couple of generations. Such a transition period…makes human beings very insecure. They look around for something to hold onto, that will give them an identity. In our case, that something is usually Islam.
[Islamic Spirituality: The Forgotten Revolution] ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

The Sira is the interpretation of the Sura ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

Know yourself. Be authentic. Have courage. ~ Murad S. Shah

The 'Islamic State', that strange miscegenation of Medina with Westphalia, is always in mortal danger of linking the moral austerity of monotheism with the repressive and supervisor powers of the modern nation state. ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

Reality does not change. How you see it does. ~ Murad S. Shah

Grade school, middle school and high school were relatively easy for me, and with little studying, I was an honor student every semester, graduating 5th in my high school class. ~ Ferid Murad

Since leaving Kocho, I had begged for death, I had willed Salman to kill me or asked God to let me die or refused to eat or drink in the hopes I would fade away. I had thought many times that the man who raped and beat me would kill me. But death had never come. In the checkpoint bathroom, I began to cry. For the first time since I left Kocho, I thought I actually might die. And I also knew for sure that I didn't want to. ~ Nadia Murad

Hand the secular Arab a glass of urine, and tell him that it is wine. He will not only pretend to enjoy it, he will enjoy it. ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

I knew I wanted considerable education so that I wouldn't have to work as hard as my parents. ~ Ferid Murad

I just got another kitten, you know. Found another trademark. It's quite embarrassing I missed it."
"Nine cats? They can send you to prison for that."
He pushed his glasses back on his nose. "I'm calling him Murad, after the cigarettes."
"Never heard of them."
"They're an obsolete Turkish brand, popular in the 1910s and '20s. Murad means 'desire' in Arabic. The only brand that ever appears in a Cordova film is Murad. There's not one Marlboro, Camel, or Virginia Slim. It goes further. If the Murad cigarette is focused upon by the camera in any Cordova film. The very next person who appears on-screen has been devastatingly targeted. In other words, the gods will have drawn a great big X across his shoulder blades and taped an invisible sign there that reads FUCKED. His life will henceforth never be the same. ~ Marisha Pessl

Do not divulge any fact that will help nobody. ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

The energy of youth with the experience of age is a lethal combination. ~ Murad S. Shah

Allah has names of Beauty: the Compassionate, the Merciful, the Gentle, and many others. But He also has Names of Rigour: the Overwhelming, the Just, the Avenger. The world in which we live exists as the interaction and the manifestation of all of the divine attributes. Hence it is a place of ease and of hardship, of joy and of sorrow. It has to be this way: a world in which there was only ease could not be a place in which we can discover ourselves to be true human beings. It is only by experiencing hardship, and loss, and bereavement, and disease, that we rise above our egos, and show that we can live for others, and for principles, rather than only for ourselves. ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

wrongly taught that fruit can cause weight gain due to its sugar content and that starchy vegetables such as squash and potatoes are "bad" because they contain so many carbohydrates. Much to the contrary, fruits and vegetables contain a wealth of nutrients that support cellular health and facilitate the transportation of water into the cells for use. ~ Howard Murad

In fact, it would be a worrying inditement of the legitimacy of the religion [Islam] if the modern world approved of us. We complain of negative stereotypes and hostility but in fact that's always been the way of the believers against the uncomprehending outside world. That's a sign of our legitimacy… Those religions that are approved of and patted on the head by secular, consumerist, capitalistic, modernity are by that very same token…a source of worry from the point of view of legitimate traditional perspective… So we should be proud that the modern world doesn't like us, it's a sign of authenticity. ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

Senselessly pontificating about things does not get anything done, doing something about it does. ~ Murad S. Shah

Reality is only as true as it is perceived. Reality does not change. How it is perceived does. ~ Murad S. Shah

Words do not solve problems, actions do. ~ Murad S. Shah

Radu had practiced the poem so often he could recite it in his sleep. He had stolen shiny bits from famous Arabic poems, gathering them like a raven to line his own nest. The language was dense and flowery, hyperbolic in the extreme. Murad listened, enraptured, as his reign was likened to the ocean and his posterity a mighty river. ~ Kiersten White

Religion is never more tested than when our emotions are ablaze. At such a time, the timeless grandeur of the Law and its ethics stand at our mercy. ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

My parents always encouraged us to get an education and establish a profession. However, my brothers and I grew up with considerable freedom, whether it was saving or spending our tips from the restaurant or our career choices. ~ Ferid Murad

Time is not money or gold; it is life itself and is limited. You must begin to appreciate every moment of your life and always strive to make the best use of it. ~ Khurram Murad

There should be no difficulty in understanding this love. Each one of you knows what love is. You know how restless one is to get close to whomsoever one loves; what pleasure one feels even in taking the name of the beloved and in taking that name again and again; the earnest zest with which one strives to win over one's beloved, and the extent to which one dreads the displeasure of the beloved. Just keep examining to what extent you have attained this love. Peep into your heart and see what is the place of Allah therein. The same shall be your place to Him. ~ Khurram Murad

The circle that they drew was laid with fresh petals from the cherry tree on a bed of salt... ~ Mahvesh Murad

Repentance and yearning, and yearning and repentance: this is the total harvest of life. ~ Khurram Murad

If the dominant ideology is to be liberalism - a doctrine of tolerance - then to what extent can liberalism tolerate anything other than itself?

Liberalism seems to be increasingly coercive. 'You must have such and such a curriculum...You must have certain views on alternative sexualities...You must have certain views about gender...etc etc' in an increasing set of boxes which one is expected to tick, which seems to sit ill with the basic premise of liberalism which is to open the horizon for people to think and behave as they will as long as they do not constitute a threat to public order. The current strange liberal inquisition in the schools: Thou Shalt Be A Liberal, is just an example of the paradox of this Late Liberal or Coercive Liberal Project. ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

Women are not difficult; but they are difficult to understand.
Men are not easy; but they are easy to understand. ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

The more golden the opportunity, the less likely you will see it. ~ Murad S. Shah